This paper builds on contributions to the Sloan conference Benefit-Cost Analysis of Financial Regulation, held at the University of Chicago, to show how benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of financial regulations should be conducted. Our major themes are that (1) on theoretical grounds, BCA should be...

Standard policies to correct market power and selection can be misguided when these two forces co-exist. Using a calibrated model of employer-sponsored health insurance, we show that the risk adjustment commonly used by employers to offset adverse selection often reduces the amount of...

One of the most salient issues faced by platforms like newspapers and credit card issuers is that users are heterogeneous in the value they bring to other users or to the platform. We develop a model with multi-dimensional heterogeneity where a monopoly platform chooses (price or non-price)...

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods--such as land or dispersed spectrum--from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions,...

Many models of monopoly in two-sided markets have been proposed (Rochet and Tirole, 2006), but little is known about them. I provide a full set of comparative statics for three models, one that generalizes that of Rochet and Tirole (2003), a second that generalizes Armstrong (2006) and a third...

Rochet and Tirole [Rochet, J.-C., Tirole, J., 2003. Platform competition in two-sided markets. Journal of the European Economic Association 1(4), 990-1029] consider the consumer Ramsey problem in a model of two-sided markets. I extend their analysis to the social Ramsey and Lindahl problems,...

We extend five principles of tax incidence under perfect competition to a general model of imperfect competition. The principles cover (1) the independence of physical and economic incidence, the (2) qualitative and (3) quantitative manner in which taxes are split between consumers and...

What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property (IP) selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex ante screening benefit and the ex post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in...

Calls for benefit-cost analysis in rule-making, based on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, have revealed a paucity of work on allocative efficiency in financial markets. We propose three principles to help fill this gap. First, we highlight the need for quantifying the statistical cost of a...

In an economy with indivisible goods, a continuum of agents and quasilinear utility, we show that equilibrium exists regardless of the nature of agents' preferences over bundles. This contrasts with results for economies with a finite number of agents, which require restrictions on preferences...